Two days after Kristen Stewart flashed the flesh in On the Road, her Twilight co-star Robert Pattison arrived on the big screen in Cannes looking for shock and awe. But David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis is guaranteed to flummox anyone expecting to see a feature-length version of the movie's sizzling teaser trailer.

A hooker with a taser, Robert Pattinson blasting a bloody hole through his left hand, a man stabbed through the eye, a giant rat prowling through the streets, a rioting crowd... all these moments are here. But they surface periodically in an ocean of babble because, somehow, Cosmopolis is even more talky and less cinematic than Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method. Sex, violence and chaos have rarely felt less exciting.

Bold, weird and not particularly compelling, Cronenberg's artily-staged movie does at least make a lot of sense for Pattinson: he plays a mega-bored, mega-rich twentysomething who wants to bust out of his own life. He sharks across Manhattan in a white stretch limo to get a haircut, but his marriage is falling apart, his wealth is in danger of evaporating on the stock market, protesters are rioting in the streets and at least one person is trying to kill him.

Water for Elephants and Bel Ami proved Pattinson is chasing darker roles and this is a bold step up. There's a nihilistic sarcasm about his performance that's nicely judged and you can feel Cronenberg channelling his vampiric blankness. But most of Cronenberg's movie boils down to dense, difficult monologues about capitalism - lifted uneasily from Don DeLillo's novel - by a string of cameo stars. Juliette Binoche bounces around on Pattison, Samantha Morton talks time and money, Mathieu Amalric pops up as a pie-chucking protestor.

Stylised but not stylish, it's satire of a society driven to self-destruction fails to pull into focus often enough. There's plenty to chew on here but it's just not much of a ride.